from Poisoning Paradise: An Environmental History of Madison
By Maria C. Powell, PhD
Before European-Americans settled in Madison, the Ho-Chunk people got their drinking water from artesian springs and the lakes. Early European-American settlers, including my great-great grandparents, did so as well.
While Lake Monona water was fouled very quickly with sewage, Lake Mendota remained cleaner for a longer period of time and in Madison’s early days, city leaders proposed getting the city’s drinking water from it because it would be much less expensive than digging and maintaining wells. In 1857, Lyman Draper, Secretary of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, wrote that the “Madison Hydraulic Company” was “chartered and fully organized,” but to dig permanent wells in the higher parts of the city it would need to drill down about seventy feet, which would be “expensive to dig, costly to keep in repair, and troublesome to raise the water.” So the company proposed to instead get water from Lake Mendota from 25 deep and force it by steam “or other power” into a reservoir at the University on a hill and then convey it to the Capitol area by gravity, “thus furnishing our citizens a full and certain supply, at all times, of pure fresh water.”[i]
Though plans to use Lake Mendota for city drinking water simmered for decades after the city was founded, it never happened (though the university used lake water for fire protection for some time).
Oops! Model City Madison fouls “Sylvan Deities” with sewage and industrial wastes
Within 75 years of my family’s first swim in a nearly pristine Lake Monona in 1851, the lake was so polluted with sewage, industrial, and agricultural wastes that most resorts along it closed and Madison’s dream of being a “resort town” fizzled.
How did this happen? Large portions of Madison–especially on the Isthmus, east and north sides—were developed on wetlands and marshes. Early in its development Madison and Dane County built systems of ditches and storm drains throughout these wet areas to drain water away so businesses, industries, homes, and farms could be constructed on them.
Kipp and Oscar Mayer were built on wetlands close to Starkweather Creek. While both companies grew and profited, their wastes gushed—sometimes intentionally, sometimes not–into Madison storm drains that released them to creeks, marshes, and lakes. Kipp’s stormwater wastes went directly to Starkweather Creek, Oscar Mayer’s to the Yahara River and Starkweather Creek–both of which drain into Lake Monona.
Wastes from residents as well as government buildings in the growing city also went into the lakes. From early settlement through the turn of the century, residents dug outdoor privies and cesspools to handle household wastes.[ii] More privileged private property owners constructed their own sewers to the lakes.[iii] Despite local ordinances prohibiting it, household and industrial wastes were often simply dumped directly into ditches and drains going to the lakes. A marsh at the end of East Washington was a common dumping ground for refuse and sewage.[iv] Sewage wastes from the Capitol and Dane County Courthouse were sent untreated into Lake Monona near the capitol.
The city grew rapidly and so did the amounts of wastes dumped into the lakes, especially Monona. Algal blooms were common in the lake by the late 1800s, and shallow drinking water wells were increasingly fouled with sewage.[1] In 1893, when the population of Madison was about nine times what it was the year my ancestors arrived, a newspaper article subtitled “To Purify the Lakes” reported that “The sewerage committee of the common council” and other city officials decided that a “change in the sewerage system” was needed and the “dumping of sewage in the lakes would be stopped.
As Madison leaders debated how to handle the worsening lake sewage problems, and numerous experts were called in to debate what to do, Madison residents became increasingly disgusted and angry. …” In 1895 a Lake Monona property owner sued Madison and Dane County because of “nasty blue” sewage fouling the lake near his property—discharged from sewer lines from the Dane County courthouse.[v], [vi] The same year, the operator of a boat livery near this (where Law Park is now) also sued the city.[vii]
In 1898 Madison’s first sewage treatment plant was built, but it turned out to be ineffective. In 1902 another one was constructed, but it reached its capacity by 1906.[viii] In 1910—the same year Nolen publicly released his much-awaited report, “Madison, The Model City”—a Wisconsin State Journal headline declared that “Lake Monona is a Sewage Dump,” explaining in the subhead that “City Filth is Shot into the Yahara River and also the Third Lake.”[ix]
Madison Public Health Department officials recognized that there was sewage in Lake Monona, but assured people that there was no public health threat, stating that “these conditions are not especially dangerous as long as the water is not used for drinking water.” At this time, many Madison residents, including renegade Ho-Chunk Indians caught and ate fish from Lake Monona.
Starkweather Creek channelized, dredged—and deemed a “drainage ditch”
Starkweather Creek is the largest watershed flowing into Lake Monona. When my family arrived in 1851, crossing the creek at the end of their horse-drawn carriage journey from Milwaukee, wild rice still grew on its edges. Ho-Chunk had gathered and subsisted on it for thousands of years by that time. At the time of my ancestor’s arrival, and likely until it was drained and deemed a waste ditch, Ho-Chunk people who resisted being removed from Taychopera probably continued to gather it to the extent they could, even as they were pushed to the margins of the growing city.
But the marshes and wetlands in the Starkweather watershed were impediments to settlers who wanted to farm in the fertile soils surrounding Madison. In 1908 a “drainage district” was approved by a board of commissioners to drain marshy areas around the creek to allow farms to be established.[x] The drainage district, headed by landowners in the Starkweather area, recommended repeated dredging of the creek throughout the 1900s as the creek channel filled up with silt and sediments from farming runoff and urban developments.
The original draining and dredging of the creek were major undertakings involving large equipment on floating barges. A 1911 Wisconsin State Journal article titled “Draining Marshland,” and subtitled “Big Dredgers at Work in Starkweather District, Drain 1,900 Acres,” described a “big dredger at work” near the Fair Oaks bus barn and the Burke sewage plant.[xi] A month later a front page headline screamed “Rush Work on Drainage of Big Swamp…Remove 300,000 Cubic Feet of Dirt.” The ditch on the west branch, which drains the Burke area, would be “about six feet deep and six to thirty feet wide” and was engineered by three former University of Wisconsin professors who had started their own engineering firm. [xii],[2]
The creek dredging was opposed by some citizens. One wrote to the Wisconsin State Journal in 1911 about the “great deal of expensive dredging done by liberal and progressive men” purportedly for “the general good of our county.” The writer, however, did not believe it would benefit people or the lakes, opining that “the great two channels” cutting through the lowland marshes “formerly held the water until it soaked into the soil or evaporated” but this water is now “pouring through into Lake Monona and Lake Waubesa.” It was being done, he said, “to please the fancies of a few special interests against the thousands.”[xiii]
In 1913, the year the Burke sewerage plant plan was approved, the final stretch of the “Starkweather ditch” was dredged and connected to Lake Monona.[xiv] The next year, the new Burke sewage plant was built. The industrial-residential “East End” grew rapidly and new sewer mains were constructed in the neighborhood. As Nichols noted in his descriptive, scathing 1919 Capital Times op-ed, the defective Burke plant was purposely designed so overflow would flow right into the Starkweather drainage ditch and then directly into Lake Monona.[3]
New Burke sewage plant worsens “Madison’s Hog Wallow” on the east side
In 1914, the city built yet another new sewage treatment plant in the Town of Burke, just north of the city boundary. By 1918, an expert declared the plant “defective” and admitted that raw sewage was still entering Lake Monona. The odor was described as “almost unendurable,” and meetings of “east-end” residents were called to “take action on the lake nuisance.” In 1919 Madison’s assistant city health officer declared that “every known method will be used to eliminate the odor from Lake Monona” and “a ton” of copper sulphate was on its way from Chicago for an “open war on Lake Monona odor.”[xv]
Opinion pieces printed in Madison papers during this time were colorful and passionate. “Madison once had four lakes—now it has three and a hog-wallow,” William Newton Nichols, a Monona lakeshore homeowner, wrote to The Capital Times in 1919, “and unless prompt action is taken to stop at once all further pollution by its so-called sewerage-disposal plant it will have a pestilence and three cesspools to advertise its ‘kulture.’”
His comments about the new Burke plant were sarcastic and scathing. “As though the builders of the filter beds feared something might not reach the lake,” he wrote, “they dug a moat of earth outside and lower than the concrete, one that receives the flow from the filter beds, and connected this across the marsh eastward to the Starkweather drainage ditch—so that all leakage from the cracked beds goes straight into the head of the lake and this leakage produced the horrible conditions at the Starkweather bridge…” Because of this design, he wrote, “all the concentrated and consecrated filth of the whole city is poured out of the Yahara and Starkweather and deposited along the beach” on the east side. “This is no accident,” he continued, “it is by a deliberate design, for the connection with the Starkweather was installed at the time of the building of the sewerage-disposal plant, but it did not become so offensive as now until the beds and walls began cracking, because of their being built in a morass.”
Nichols explicitly accused the city of perpetuating the class divide built into the Madison Compromise in their sewerage decisions. “The same political power that denies the Sixth ward its proper share in the government of the city also decreed the dumping of the filth of the “cultured” part of the city upon the section where the workingmen live. There are marshes to the west of town—marshes to the south, and if it is proper to build a filter plant in a marsh, let us build one at the head of University bay and another in the marsh above Lake Wingra—then let each section of the city wallow in its own filth—but don’t let the ignorance and insolence of the snogacracy outrage law and decency any longer by dumping the sewerage of the non-producing west side seven miles to dump it on the toilers of the Sixth ward!”[xvi]
In fact, city officials originally planned to direct Burke plant discharges to Lake Mendota, but Maple Bluff residents successfully fought it, and they were instead directed to the Yahara River and Lake Monona.[xvii] In coming years, Maple Bluff residents began complaining about odors from the Oscar Mayer and the Burke sewage plant; in 1923 a complaint was referred to the city board of health by Senator La Follette, who lived in Maple Bluff.[xviii]
John W. Alvord—who helped design the Burke plant–denied that the sewage from the plant was the main source of odors in the lake, declaring that the plant was “one of the best of its size in the country” and there were other sources of pollution. “Changes in the original design…were not made from thoughtlessness …but because of presumable difficulties in construction” and according to Mr. Alvord, “certain embarrassments to the operation of the plant have resulted.” Still, he planned to recruit “[t]he most expert help available…to prove the denial of the allegation that the sewage plant has been the main cause of lake odors” by doing a survey of other pollution sources to the lake. The city engineer also shared plans to fix problems at the plant and the council approved a resolution to provide funding for the work.[xix]
While some of the industrial wastes from eastside factories made their way to the Burke plant for treatment—albeit inadequate—many wastes went to Lake Monona untreated, and the city was well aware of that. Mr. Nichols also observed several industrial sources going directly to the lakes, such as “very foul water and sewerage” flowing into the Yahara from Gisholt and Fuller and Johnson, and another with a “stream of lime or cement” from the Burgess Laboratory that is “poisoning the fish.” Further, he said, the city built a storm sewer that connected the Scanlon-Morris factory to an open ditch which “runs a foul, stinking stream coming from either the packing plant, the garbage incinerator, the filter beds or all combined, but wherever it gets its material it is absolute filth.”
[1] Drinking water was also quickly fouled. While wealthier people on Mansion Hill and the west side eventually sunk deeper wells, people living in lower income areas of the city had very shallow drinking water wells that quickly became contaminated with their own sewage—and diseases spread in these areas of the city early on. Cholera epidemics broke out in 1849, 1852, and 1854.
[2] Large corporations along the creek like the U.S. Sugar Beet Company at the mouth of Starkweather, railroad companies with tracks crossing the creek, and other wealthy interests supported creek dredging and channelizing—it helped drain their industrial wastes away–but protested the amounts of taxes they were being charged to support it—saying they were “excessive and inequitable.” 1909.2.20 WSJ
[3] In 1915 residents living in east side neighborhoods began advocating for a park near Starkweather. 1915.8.14.
[i] Lyman Draper, 1857, pg. 39
[ii] Mollenhoff, p. 61
[iii] 1939.9.24 WSJ
[iv] 1884.12.9. WSJ
[v] 1895.7.23. WSJ
[vi] 1895.8.21. WSJ
[vii] 1895.8.28. WSJ
[viii] Mollenhoff
[ix] 1910.6.10 WSJ
[x] 1908.9.7. WSJ
[xi] 1911.11.4.WSJ
[xii] 1911.12.23 WSJ
[xiii] 1913.8.7. WSJ
[xiv] 1913.10.12, 1913.11.17
[xv] 1919.3.24. WSJ
[xvi] 1919.3.25 CT
[xvii] 1933.2.13 Cap Times, Voice of the People
[xviii] 1923.8.25 WSJ
[xix] 1919.6.15 WSJ
© 2023 Maria C. Powell. All rights reserved.